Great Chinese Inventions
Great Chinese InventionsThe World is forever in debt to China for its innovations.
Ancient China was extreme advance and many of its discoveries are
still in use today. This is what Robert Temple, the author of The
Genius of China 3000 years of science, discovery and invention. The
book is based on 11 main parts of Chinese innovation. Within these 11
categories, there are 3 main parts that contain the most significant
inventions. Robert Temple concentrates the bulk of his examples in
these three categories, agriculture, domestic and industrial
technology , and engineering. Temple�s examples were not limited
to these fields of innovation. The Chinese excelled in many other
areas, including mathematics, warfare and transportation, to name a
few. Although Temple wrote about eleven fields of invention, I feel
that these three sections contain the greatest examples of Chinese
innovation, and the debt that the modern world owes China.
The first main area is the field of engineering. Within this
chapter, the development of iron and steel is the greatest
achievement. The development of iron and steel led to other advances.
By at least the 4th century the Chinese have developed blast furnaces
to obtain cast iron from iron ore. This was 1200 years before the
first blast furnace showed up in Europe. The reasons that the author
gave to explain the reasons why the Chinese developed this technology
are simple. The Chinese had access to large amounts of clay, the key
ingredient in making blast furnaces. The Chinese also figured out
that by adding a substance they called �Black Earth,� they could lower
the melting point of iron.
Another major invention of the Chinese, that led to other
achievements, is steel. The common belief today is that Henry Bessemer
discovered the process of refining iron into steel. The fact is
Chinese had developed the process to refine iron into steel in the
second century BC The Chinese learned that by injecting oxygen into
the blast furnace, they could remove the carbon from the iron. The
Chinese called this process the �hundred refinings method� since they
repeated the process that many times. The finished product was highly
prized in China for its strength and ability to hold an edge on a
sword. The Chinese would weld the steel onto weaker iron thus creating
a strong edge and a superior weapon. The Chinese iron and steel
workers were the best at making different types of metals into modern
times. But then, no one else could have done so at the time, since
iron existed nowhere else but in China.
The Chinese invented the chain pump in the first century AD The
chain pump allows water to the pumped from lower to higher elevations.
The chain pumps were used for draining and pumping in civil
engineering, but what is more important is it was used for irrigation.
Irrigation allows...
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